The Atlantic Report on the World Today: South Africa

RACE tension and rioting are on the increase in the Union of South Africa. In this unhappy land upwards of two million while Europeans are trying to keep under control nearly eight million resentful natives. The problem has been aggravated by the pressure of thousands of poverty-stricken blacks who have poured into cities and towns, looking for industrial jobs. Housing in segregated areas is hopelessly inadequate and crime has increased.

The general election of 1948 was won by Dr. Daniel François Malan and his Nationalist Party on the strength of their “Black Menace" campaign and their promise to separate the races and ensure white supremacy for all time. General Smuts’s United Parly, with its nebulous native policy teetering between white supremacy and fair play for the natives, went down to defeat by a slim margin. South Africans chose race separation or Apartheid, to use the Afrikaans word.

In line with its Apartheid policy, the Government has tried to rid South Africa of her vociferous minority of Asiatic Indians, who are struggling for political and social equality. In 1860 the Indians were brought in to work the sugar estates of Natal, and today they number nearly 300,000. To implement its repatriation scheme, the Government has offered them passage to India, but men whose fathers were born in South Africa have no wish to go to a land as foreign to them as to most South Africans. In 1948 twenty-seven emigrated, and during the first half of 1949 forty-two —a drop in the bucket.

Against this background of fear and racial antagonism lawlessness has so increased that there were five serious riots on the Rand between October and February. Even Prime Minister Malan admits a deterioration in the relationship between nonEuropeans and Europeans. Other South Africans describe the situation more forcibly as having “worsened disastrously.”A shift has taken place in native thought. Hitherto, the native aspired to become a South African citizen and was prepared to accept high qualifications for the privilege. Now he is thinking of Africa for Africans and of freedom from control by the white man.

The attitude of Europeans, also, has degenerated. A Cabinet Minister was publicly rebuked for referring to non-Europeans as “Hottentots" and

“Kaffirs.”A growing arrogance among petty officials — police, pass office clerks, streetcar conductors, and the like—became so conspicuous in the past year that the South African Institute of Race Relations felt it necessary, on several occasions, to request the authorities to “recall white men to a proper sense of human dignity.”Even a Nationalist newspaper pointed out the need for greater courtesy from Europeans to non-Europeans.

Priests working in missions among natives on the Rand deplore the increase of hooliganism among young whites, who insult and assault non-Europeans for no other reason, apparently, than that they are not while. Among natives, a comparable hooliganism has found expression in violence and even in burning mission buildings.

Africa for whites?

Both European and non-European critics blame the Nationalist policy of Apartheid for this increasingly dangerous situation. The Government, convinced that separation is the key to while supremacy and to reducing race friction, blames the critical Opposition, the English language press, and the Communists.

Their argument runs that criticism of white by while lowers the prestige of the white race among non-Europeans. They further state that any criticism referring to native rights automatically strengthens native ambition to become a part of Western civilization and thus creates trouble.

The English press, if not unanimously behind General Smuts and his United Party, at least is almost unanimously opposed to the Nationalist Government and, in varying degrees, to its race policy. It therefore is assailed for “slandering" South Africa. A pro-Government newspaper, which includes the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice among its directors, sums up by saying, “Overseas this voice or that voice must not be heard but, as far as possible, the Voice of South Africa — its thousands of separate voices in one.”

This would be like proposing that Life, the Reader’s Digest, the New York Times and all other United States newspapers with foreign circulation, should carry but one message and should be in agreement on all U.S. government policies, domestic and foreign. The House of Assembly is debating an inquiry into the press and a control of reporting, with particular emphasis on English language newspapers and correspondents.

The master race

The sectionalism of the present government is expressed in many ways. For the firsl time since Union there is no representative of Englishspeaking South Africans in the Cabinet. All Ministers are not only Afrikaners but, with possibly one or two exceptions, Afrikaners of extrente Nationalist persuasion.

The military forces are being reorganized, with preference given to the ware Afrikaner. General Smuts was dismissed as Commander-in-Chief without a word of thanks for his services. The Chief of Intelligence was dismissed and his files carried off under police escort. The Chief of Staff was bowler-hatted, and his successor has resigned for unexplained reasons. Those who opposed the war effort are being brought into the Army . Incredible as it may seem, an Afrikaans newspaper explains that “to make the Defense Force truly national, that part of the population which opposed the war should be brought into it.”

The Civil Service, too, is being reorganized in favor of nationalist Afrikaners. The state-owned railways have had their Grievances Commission, and those who lost their posts and pay are being reinstated, in spite of the fact that what they now call their grievances were, in most cases, penalties for subversive activitics during the war.

Next, the ex-internees are to air their grievances, and it seems that, like the railway men, those who lost their government posts are to be reinstated with back pay. The BBC news service in Afrikaans has been discontinued, and the service in English is to be silenced soon.

One of the first acts of the Nationalist Government was to cut down on state-aided immigration and to curtail the flow from Great Britain in particular. Instead, efforts now are made to secure Germans and Hollanders. Of the 2200 who were naturalized in the last half of 1949, 90 per cent were German, including a Dr. Hirsekorn, one of the most active Nazis in South-West Africa and the No. 1 man listed for deportation until the Nationalists took over.

The Cil izenship Bill passed in June, 1949, makes live years residence obligatory before a Commonwealth citizen can become a South African, instead of two years as formerly. And it is left to the absolute discretion of the Minister of Interior 1o grant or withhold a Certificate of Registration for citizenship, without giving a reason and without appeal. There was strong opposition to the bill throughout the country, expressed in heated mass meetings, but the Nationalist majority passed it.

In the Transvaal, a lirsl move has been taken toward what is called Christian Nationalist education. Previously the schools were bilingual, with the object of welding the two European language groups. Now Transvaal children are to be grouped by home language and segregated into separate schools. Thus another wedge is driven between the two populations.

A Registration Act under which everyone except natives under eighteen years old will be registered has passed a second reading in Parliament. Distressing investigations into ancestry are feared, but the measure will make it easier to apply Apartheid and to disfranchise Colored voters in the Cape. It could also serve to winnow the ware Afrikaner from the English-speaking South African and establish distinctions between the “nationally minded" and those not so minded, as was proposed in 1942 in a constitution for a republic.

The intense preoccupation of South Africa with race and national origin is difficult for most Americans to understand, yet there is no stronger force at work in the Union today, in spite of a soaring cost of living, economic stress, and import control.

The Government represents a minority in the country. It is estimated that 80 per cent of the Afrikaner population belongs to the two parties of the Government coalition: the Nationalist Party led by Prime Minister Malan, and the Afrikaner Party led by Finance Minister N. C. Havenga. Because of the electoral load against the towns in favor of the country, the Nationalists won the 1948 election, although 130,000 more voters voted against them than for them, so Nationalist policies should not be interpreted as necessarily national policies. Between them, the two parties hold a majority of six seats, which is enough to ensure the passage of legislation, but not the two-thirds necessary to make constitutional changes.

Communist breeding ground

Since its beginning in the early twenties, the appeal of the Communist Party to Africans has waxed and waned; the stronger the African national organizations, the fewer Africans in the Party, for Communists do not sympathize with nationalism in Africa any more than they do in Yugoslavia. On the other hand, the more intense the racialism of Europeans, the larger the Communist Party gets, among Africans and Europeans alike.

In 1946, for example, four Communists sought election to advisory boards for African locations, or dwelling areas, on the Rand, which is the section of most militant African feeling. All four were defeated. Since the Nationalists took office in 1948, two Communists have been elected; one to the House of Assembly as native representative — the first Communist to sit in the House; the second as native representative on the Cape Provincial Council.

Whatever success the Communists achieve in Africa may be attributed in part, at least, to increasing tension between European and non-European. The point was made four years ago that if there were no Communists in South Africa, Dr. Malan would have to invent them to support his Black Menace doctrine. Today he does not have to invent them.

Unquestionably the mission from the U.S.S.R. in Pretoria, manned by twenty-seven, is larger than seems necessary to handle Soviet affairs in South Africa. That the Communists have material with which to arouse the non-European is obvious. Should Communism take hold of nalivc imagination, through its lip service to non-discrimination, it would be a major menace.

Republic the making?

In two recent speeches, Prime Minister Malan has revived the issue of a republic, adding that a republic could remain within the Commonwealth if it chose to do so. The question that is under scrutiny is what kind of republic, for the Nationalist Party is pledged to a republic based on Afrikanerdom.

By refusing United Nations requests to submit a trusteeship agreement for South-West Africa and by granting the territory six seats in the Union’s House of Assembly, the Nationalists may be expected to add those seats to their strength in elections scheduled for May. By taking about 48,000 Colored voters off the common roll, the Party would increase its strength in the Cape, the only province in which Coloreds may vote. Dr. Malan recently attributed the small Nationalist margin in a byelection to Colored voters, and promised their eventual disfranchisement. If, in addition, the electoral load favoring the platteland were increased, the two-thirds majority necessary to make constitutional changes could be achieved.

Should the most highly industrialized state south of the Sahara, and that with the largest white population, cleliver itself into the hands of the ware Afrikaner minority, it would become a nation divided and weak.

A regime committed to a racialist, static society would also be a disturbing clement on a continent where the black-white relationship is not yet resolved. Therein lies the danger to Africa, to the Commonwealth, and to United States policies as expressed through the Point Four Program.

Aspirations for greater opportunity are stirring throughout Africa’s 160 million natives. Should the native resentment which is generating in the Union at present stir race sympathy to the north, the security of colonies to which Belgium, Prance, and Great Britain are turning to bolster their economies might be threatened. This, in turn, would dissipate some of our efforts to further European recovery. Yet only South Africa can resolve the issue, republic or not; and if a republic, then what, kind?